Interdisciplinarity and mechanobiology

Cells in living tissues and organs continually sense and respond to both external mechanical stimuli and internal forces generated by other cells inside our bodies, and this phenomenon has become increasingly recognized as a key driver of physiological, developmental, and disease processes. Pursuit of the mechanisms that underlie these processes led to the emergence of the field of mechanobiology, which is an extremely interdisciplinary field of research at the interface between biology, physics, material science, and bioengineering. Researchers have been focusing on elucidating how cells sense and transduce mechanical forces, how changes in the mechanical properties of cells influence their behaviors, and how physical forces influence normal and diseased tissue development and function. Mechanobiology principles have been also applied to biomedical issues, and novel tools developed to explore these physical phenomena have helped to pave the way for the development of point-of-care diagnostics and the discovery of new mechanoresponsive therapies.